Priorities reflect our Values
Passion reflects our Vision
Persistence reflects View
"The More choices you have, the more your values matter."
Michael Schrage
This week we've been celebrating our graduates and their future. We've watched them grow, we taught them God's plan, and we've offered them the love and security of a church family. But at this moment of transition, we stop and consider what is the best thing we could give this new generation. We've given them a good education in order to get a good job, make money, have security, and build the American Dream. But have we given them joy, peace, love, gentleness, perseverance and hope. Have we given them FAITH? Have we given them our Values, Wisdom from people who have experienced this road before, or the Truth that life is build on a foundation of morals. In the world of Martin Luther King, Jr., this is a moral universe with essential laws and values as pressing and significant as the physical laws that govern motion. To live without a sense of our core morals, is like jumping from an airplane without a parachute because you alone can fly. For awhile it certainly seems to be true as you glide effortlessly through the air. BUT the spiritual laws of the universe eventually become apparent and you realize the folly of your decision, but with disastrous consequences. It is our calling to offer to your young adults and older adults the Truth of life as expressed in the Scriptures, verified by saints and sinners, and offered at the Cost of Christ's life. Re-Discovering Lost Values - Martin Luther King, Jr. preached February 28, 1954 in Detroit Graduate Blessing Slides: Graduate Blessing Sermon Slides: Worship 5.20.12 Community of Value - pdf Worship 5.20.12 Community of Value - PowerPoint Sermon Audio: A Community of Values 5.20.12L A Community of Values 5.20.12eEmail Subscription:
…in addition to the “words of [the pastor’s] mouth and the meditations of his heart,” which, when coupled with the Holy Spirit’s guiding, prompted him to recommend the gifting of truth, wisdom, and integrity to this year’s graduates as well as, through implication, all in the world and especially those listening to and hearing his message, the words of Rudyard Kipling famous and oft-quoted poem “If”:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
For “the young,” the “world is their oyster,” as the saying goes; for those with the years of reality and eye-opening-experience on them, the world is more like the “prowling lion” in its cruel and uncaring destruction of its unsuspecting prey; its inhumane and unjust destruction of dreams and self; and its insidious transformation of one’s soul and heart from the giver to the taker, from the contributor to the consumer, from the servant to the master, from the “Child of Christ radiating His light for all living in the darkness to see and choose” to an inhabitant of the darkness and a god of a world of his or her own making while choosing success and self above all-else and, most destructively, above God.
Consider the poets’ definition of success, which expresses for them and as well as should express for God’s people, the simplicity yet blessedness of a “truth, wisdom, and integrity” success acquired when living a life based on and filled with the sharing of the values — Christ values, core values — referenced by the pastor in his sermon and in the included writings above:
“Success”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.
“What Constitutes Success”
By Bessie Stanley (1905)
He has achieved success who has lived well,
laughed often and loved much;
who has gained the respect of intelligent men
and the love of little children;
who has filled his niche and accomplished his task;
who has left the world better than he found it,
whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul;
who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty
or failed to express it;
who has always looked for the best in others
and given them the best he had;
whose life was an inspiration;
whose memory a benediction.
How many times is the word “pray,” in one form or another, used in the Bible?
With great rapidity, Google will provide the numerical answer to this question.
Citing the King James Version of the Bible, one Google-suggested source indicates the usage of the word “pray” and its derivatives as follows:
prayer — 114 times
pray — 313 times
prayed — 65 times
praying — 20 times
TOTAL — 512 times
We are told in the Bible, no matter the version, that “on the night in which He was bretrayed,” Christ went to the Mount of Olives with three of His disciples asking them to stay close by and pray while He prayed in the garden and proving to Him, as is often and also the case with us, “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”
He was about to be betrayed…He knew He was going to be betrayed…and He prayed, “drops of blood He prayed”…we know some of what Christ prayed, but not all…and we know the answer He not only was told but the answer He chose as His own, the choice He made…we also know how the Son dreaded the separation and the isolation from the Father that the hours from crucifixion to ressurection would invovle…and we know that His answer, as He had done numerous times previously, when faced with traversing “the valleys” as opposed to ascending to the “mountaintops” of life, was to pray — to talk with His Father; to seek guidance, direction, and discernment from God; to “come before the Presence of God with praise and thanksgiving”; to know that “He could do all things through God Who would strengthen Him”; to know, as the pastor mentioned in his last week’s sermon, that “God delighted in Him” and that “His Father, God, and LORD loved Him.”
All of this and so very, very, very much more was accomplished for Christ when He talked with God in prayer.
Is not, has not, and would not the same be given to each of us by “our Father Who art in heaven” when we surrender ourselves, our hearts, and all our needs to Him in prayer?
…consider…
Ephesians 6:18 “And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.”
…and…
Philippians 4:6 “Be anxious for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.”
Humbly, while not being a wise and learned pastor, but only one who has seen in the lives of those I know and love “the power of prayer,” I would suggest that the pastor’s values of “truth, wisdom, and integrity” be expanded from three to four by including as a value worthy of teaching and imparting, the core value of prayer.